Tag Archives for collaboration
Last week I attended an event called Pecha Kucha Night Vancouver. The idea is similar to TEDx, where a local organizer puts on a series of talks for a general audience. The twist with pecha kucha is that every presenter has 20 slides and only 20 seconds on each.
This particular night was Vancouver’s 16th pecha kucha night (pronounced correctly, I think, as peh-CHUK-cha) but my first time attending. It struck me at first as a series of what were essentially advertisements: a speaker would arrive to the stage and spend the next 6:40 talking about what they do (be it in fashion, art, design, whatever).
In and of themselves, these 7 minute product pitches would be fairly entertaining since they are from local business people doing things they love, and generally finding success. The truly great pecha kucha presentations, though, take their pitch and elevate it to a message. The one that brought down the house for me was by a designer named Carson Ting, and his talk resonated because he spoke about what we try to do when we practice social media, but in the context of making commercial art. His message was, to use his words (and pardon my French): “share your creative s***.”
Essentially he explained that as an artist, he uses social and multimedia online tools to not only produce his commercial artwork, but also to document and share the process of creating it. By sharing his creative process so that others can learn and benefit from it, his art becomes much more than just the final product.
This is such an important message in social media and healthcare. We are so often caught up in not only concerns about proprietary projects (because of funding competitions) but also concerns over privacy. Sometimes, we simply “forget” to be open, or we simply get caught up in doing things the “old way,” and we default to a mode of hiding everything until there is some “success” or “final draft” that can finally be shared with the outside world.
That way of doing things hides our true thunder. It keeps others from fully knowing what we do, how we learn and improve, and plays down the fact that we are truly passionate about and creating things that can improve other people’s lives. True success today, to my mind, is when someone is able to take what you’ve done, replicate it, and build upon it. Not sharing the process shows that we have at the core a personal motive, rather than a lofty goal: improving the health system.
I’m so glad to have been at this event because it allowed me to see engaged people outside of health care who grasp the importance of social media, and the significance of being able to share the process of their work. I hope I can be better about this myself, and I hope the people I work with in the future will be, too.
I came across an article this weekend by Ruth Raynard titled Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities the gist of which is that social media and social networks provide a unique ability to change and enhance online learning for students that targets their famililarity and skills in the online arena. Raynard says:
My discussion here… introduces the idea that social networking is only the beginning of a longer and more complex process of socially constructed learning and ultimately collaboration and knowledge building. That is, if educators only integrate the ability of students to connect and socialize, deeper points of learning will be missed. (emphasis mine)
I have been interested in this line of thinking for a while: how can we utilize and exploit the advantages of online collaboration to improve learning spaces? My own experience has shown that mimicking the traditional classroom structure online (think WebCT: modules as lectures; discussion forums with limited options for sharing resources; an email listserv, perhaps?) ignores and perhaps even actively denies many of the salient benefits of learning in an online space. Raynard recognizes and supports this resources sharing between students as well:
While in more traditional learning environments much of this must be orchestrated and planned by the instructor and organized through the grouping and pairing of students, when using a social networking tool this level of connection can happen immediately.
Using social media to enhance the collaboration and learning in the space can be tricky, however, and it does indeed, as Raynard goes on to caution, take a hands-on effort by an instructor to guide the learning and knowledge creation that takes place. I am sure that all too quickly can course facebook and wiki pages become clotted with webjunk, even (or perhaps especially?) among post-secondary students. Another challenge is increasing student comfort level with sharing their ideas publicly with the class. Raynard suggests that this is not a new instructional challenge, but rather that creating and fostering “learner autonomy” is simply present in all learning spaces and must also be tackled online.
In one conception of social media and online presence that I liked, The 4Cs Social Media Framework, breaks down the levels of collaboration and community building that are noticeable in many social media tools. The third C is community, or “the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.” That happens to double as a nice definition of a successful online classroom, doesn’t it?
What is lacking in my own knowledge and perhaps the collective writing about this topic now is a recontextualization of learning theory and education psychology that either supports or denies the types of collaboration and content creation that can take place via social media as actively beneficial to the students (or as preferable to more traditional online “classrooms”). I am working on collecting resources that explore or outline these concepts for an upcoming project, and any comments or resources would come greatly appreciated.
I had hardly any experience with Google Docs until about a month ago when I was working on a project with a partner as part of a course. Aside from having convienient online storage, there isn’t much to be noted about cloud applications until you need to work collaboratively across a group.
Once you have that need, however, it is incredible the ease with which you can collaborate and produce a cohesive project among more than one person. Emailing a .doc file, tracking changes, and getting headaches are things that spawn a disjointed and often noticeably splintered project. Given the ability to look at the same document at the same time is something that greatly improves this process, but it doesn’t seem to be something that we are used to doing, and that makes it difficult to explain.
In my mind, it takes a good experience with a Google Doc project in order to add it to the list of things that actually increase your productivity, instead of staying on the other popular list: those things that seem like they might help but really just aren’t worth it in the end (cheap shot, sorry).
Can I foresee any issues between Google Docs and faculty on a campus? I guess I could, though once it was explained, I can’t come up with a valid reason against it. Obviously it increases the availability of student assignments on the web, though if the assignment was designed to be completed by a group, I don’t see any ethical issues with that at all. An individual who was misusing the online availability of the document by sharing it inappropriately with other peers may present a problem, but I don’t see this as a large enough issue to reduce adoption of Google Docs (or any online office suite) on campus.
